I like to share my posts with my friends. I think they read them, but few say much about it—presumably because the subject matter isn’t really up their alley. I do write about awfully niche things…
I think another part of it is that I also wish I could interact with other people’s thoughts, too. None of my friends have blogs, so I can’t actually read about the stuff they’re thinking about or doing. There’s nothing I could ever respond to.
The Internet is kind of a wild west. If I interacted with a random person, I feel like I could accidentally say something I shouldn’t because I don’t really know them too well. I know my friends a lot better, and I would be interested in starting some kind of group blog where we can post stuff and respond to each other seriously, without as much risk of it becoming some big drama or whatever. We know each other, and we know we mean well.
Ideally it’s like having “intellectually serious” (or really, just earnest) discussion about the things we like (though I’d love to see random introspection too). Our thought process happens in public, and we all have an excellent opportunity to challenge each other’s thinking and change. It won’t really be a traditional publication with editors or a house style; maybe some light governance around explicit authorship and other things to address challenges I’m sure it would face.
Well, okay, maybe I lied about there being no “house style.” I do want to set the tone of this group blog to be one of plainspokenness, transparency about uncertainty,[1] and writing to think (instead of writing for mass appeal). It is not a place for you to try and win arguments at all costs like social media, I want it to be a place where you can think aloud and talk about it with peers who will give their thoughts and not judge. Write what you want—a detailed, heavily researched argumentative piece or a small introspective piece; you aren’t constrained in your expression.
One concern I have though is that one person is more prolific in their writing than everyone else, and drowns out all of the other voices (likely me if I’m the one starting this whole thing…). Or that people start writing for what they think belongs on the publication rather than what they actually think. Maybe they would fear being one dissenting opinion and getting dog-piled on. I don’t know how to address these, because it seems like a matter of the publication culture (though maybe the first issue could be addressed by some kind of publishing schedule… but I also don’t want something like that to be too overbearing, so it would need to be very carefully designed).
And how do I expect people to respond to posts about subjects they know nothing about? Perhaps we don’t always need to emphasize always responding with full posts about the same subject to every post. Maybe it could be more emphasis on what a post made you think. That could help connect ideas across subjects, even if you don’t quite know the material. Cross-domain thinking, how noble; reminds me of Obsidian already.
There’s also how it would be technically implemented. There are some friends I have who I’m sure would more appreciative of not having to work with Jekyll or GitHub or any kind of coding. Maybe they could submit their works to me and I could merge it in, but this is awkward and could risk turning me into some kind of gatekeeper.
Ugh, governance and group work is hard. Friends, DM me if you’re even remotely interested.
Is that called epistemic humility? I don’t know. ↩︎
On Wikipedia, there is a type of page known as a “disambiguation” page. You’ve probably seen a link that looks like this: “Obsidian (disambiguation).” Instead of taking you to an article directly (as a redirect or normal link would), you are instead presented with a list of articles.
The articles listed in a disambiguation page all share similar or exact names, with a short description to the side (and in the article title) to help you differentiate the articles and find the one you need. It allows Wikipedia to write about multiple subjects that share names. For Wikipedia, this alone is about as far as it needs to go—really the type of content on Wikipedia is encyclopedia entries.
For, say, my Obsidian vault, there may be a variety of content types. An encyclopedia like Wikipedia, a dictionary like Wiktionary, source texts like Wikisource, etc. The astute among you will have noticed that these are just different Wikimedia sister projects all crammed into one vault. And you’d be right.
How do we handle all of these different types of content in the vault at once? Do we cram it all into one note? No! For the various Wikimedia sister projects, Obsidian exists as a Wikipedia article, a Wikidata item, and a Wikimedia Commons category. These are all distinct pages because shoving everything into one document would be messy and impractical.
Maybe keeping everything in one vault is half of my problem here, but I have my reasons for wanting everything in one vault. Since I don’t want to make a bunch of little vaults, disambiguation pages alone clearly will not suffice. If the same subject can live in multiple places, then what I think I need is to have a list somewhere like a disambiguation page to link to all of the pages about just one subject.
The name I’ve personally chosen for this type of page in my vault is a “lens,” influenced largely by how a subject’s appearance in different projects (or content types) changes. It’s kind of like seeing the different ways we talk about the same subject.
I do a lot of my organization with folders. This is because different content types like dictionary entries or encyclopedia articles are not really the same and don’t need to intermingle. Each note is named after its subject and given a unique identifier (usually a date prefix) so file names don’t conflict.
So I’ll have two folders, Dictionary/ and Encyclopedia/. Both have a note titled Markdown in them. A lens page titled Markdown will then briefly explain Markdown at the top so you know you’re looking at the lens for the right subject, and then link to Dictionary/Markdown and Encyclopedia/Markdown.
Maybe it won’t be useful to you. That’s fine, but I hope somebody found this interesting!
]]>Making my website has been fun. I’m not always the most active blogger, but a large part of why I make this site is to get that experience in designing one.
Even if you’re not a developer, there’s still plenty of opportunity to make a personal website. There are services out there (e.g., WordPress) that let you make one without coding anything. In that case, your focus will probably be more on the things you write there instead of the design and code, since that’s usually handled for you.
You can make whatever you want out of your own site:
It can literally be anything, because it’s supposed to be your space on the Internet.
For how much I use the Internet, it’s nice that I can have a place of my own. A place where I don’t need to worry about some social media algorithm. A place I can design exactly to my liking. A place I can call home.
Someday I’d hope to have some kind of list of my friends’ sites so you can check out their stuff, but few of my friends have personal websites qwq
At least for now, there’s xan and nightcat.
Go make a website. Even if it doesn’t stick, you might learn something about yourself along the way.
]]>Based on data from this website, I am apparently among the top 400 mappers on the project in the United States in the last two months. I just started around that long ago, so it is remarkable for me to see how quickly my changes have piled up as I map my hometown. Now granted, the OSM community is not nearly as large or active in the United States,[1] but I’m still quite happy with my progress.
I mostly started alone, but I actually very recently roped two friends into mapping too. One is a lot more active than the other, but that’s alright. He seems to enjoy mapping his own hometown. I see him make a lot of beginner mistakes but he’s learning fast. A friend of mine on ATProto, Xan, also started doing some edits recently when I posted about OSM because they forgot they had an account. It’s nice to see my mapping bring in some new contributors; as to whether they (or I for that matter) will last, we’ll just have to see.
Why am I mapping so much? Hate Google, simple as. But being a little bit less blunt, Google Maps has some of the most blatantly incorrect map details I’ve ever seen. Some of it is slightly excusable, like a road-shaped marking on the ground being mapped as a road, even if it’s just a proposed road that hasn’t been built yet. I’d get why an algorithm makes that mistake. I don’t get how it hallucinates a road THROUGH a major section of the high school. That part of the building consequently DOES NOT EXIST on the map anymore.
I would show screenshots but unfortunately I’m not going to figure out images on my blog right now. Seems like too much work for me at 21:00 (I will be up late working on shit anyway…). But seriously, Google botches the map in several areas to a ridiculous degree. Part of me thinks it’s probably better to have no data than bad data, so…
So yeah. Maps. Love ‘em. Go map your community, I bet there’s things missing. Open knowledge is awesome and cool and freely licensed information benefits everyone. We should not have to be dependent on corporations like Google for a goddamn map of our communities.
As far as I can tell and from what I’ve heard, Europe (and especially Germany) is a lot more active in OSM than the U.S. Maybe my contributions can help push for more Americans to map? ↩︎
I, for one, am literally viewing the world through a lens (well, two). I wear glasses. I am physically seeing the world from behind two literal panes of glass in front of my eyes at all times.
But I also view things differently based on context. My beliefs and actions shape how I view the world. The way I saw the world years ago is drastically different to how I view it now. The way I see it today will differ from how I see it tomorrow.
The lenses we look through will change over time—a necessary measure to view things with clarity. As I age, my glasses need their lenses changed so I can keep my vision sharp. Likewise, I will need to keep refining my beliefs over time to keep my mind sharp.
This all came to mind when I crouched down to pet my cat and decided to look up at my room. It’s not too big but it certainly felt massive when seeing it from an angle like that.
]]>I recently subscribed to Kagi and bought a Framework 13 Pro. I have been a subscriber of Obsidian for a few months now. Much of my consumption is aimed toward companies that generally respect me or aim to uphold values that I believe in:
All of these companies hold values that I support, and so I throw my money at them to help them achieve their mission. Are they infallible? No, they have their flaws, but the core values are what I’m trying to fund here.
Some of my money is probably going to end up funding something I don’t like, but it seems that is inevitable regardless of which company, organization, or developer I turn to. Consequently, consuming ethically is basically impossible, even for someone like me who has the time, motivation, and money to actually go and make use of these products.
Taking aside that ethical consumption is impossible, the fact that I can even make attempts at doing such is privileged. I can afford the time and effort needed to not become the product being sold—maybe not everywhere, but certainly moreso than many people around me—and that is a form of privilege.
Sometimes it feels like you get looked down upon by consumers of these products for not consuming them, even when not everyone can do so. I’m part of that problem too, as I know I’ve been condescending about the brands people choose too.[1]
One particularly bad case was when I was talking to my friend about note-taking apps and he mentioned that he used Google Keep. Google Keep worked for him and I didn’t need to be annoying and trying to get him to switch to Obsidian. ↩︎
Because note-taking apps are where I mainly work on Wikipedia, I’ll be drawing from that in my (cursory) analysis of a major limitation of the Wikipedia editing model and its impacts on article quality for certain subjects.
Take the articles for Joplin, Roam Research, Bear, Logseq. These are all stubs, meaning they are articles that lack the content needed to provide in-depth coverage of the subject.
So just write more, right? Anyone can add content to Wikipedia, right?
Well… not quite. It’s true that you can add information about these subjects, and given the time, I could go research and create in-depth encyclopedic entries of these apps. But there’s just one problem. There’s very little reliable secondary coverage of these subjects, meaning that an article like that may not meet Wikipedia’s “Verifiability” policy.
And that’s because odds are, in my research, I will have to rely upon primary sources or interpret them to say anything meaningful. The Joplin article as of the date this blog post is published relies almost entirely on primary sources, and beyond that, it uses lesser-known sources that may be scrutinized in its quality. There’s simply no good sourcing for Joplin from traditionally preferred sources (even among major tech publications).
Additionally, researching and publishing novel interpretations of primary sources would violate Wikipedia’s “No Original Research” policy. If no source has ever said something, it cannot be added on Wikipedia.
I am the primary editor of the Wikipedia article for Obsidian. Majority of the edits in recent history were from me, and according to some browser extension that lets me see who wrote what, I am responsible for over 57% of the content for that article. I am a daily user of Obsidian. I know a lot of things about Obsidian that are not even mentioned in the article.
But I can’t add it. It would either force me to use primary sources (only useful for uncontroversial claims) or these shitty content farms that just shit out content about Obsidian (secondary sources, but unreliable). I hate it. The frustration is that I believe I could write an excellent article about Obsidian, but the limitations of Wikipedia’s editing model prevent me from doing so.
But the model exists for a reason. Being edited by volunteers, Wikipedia has to rely on other editors to moderate each others’ edits. The verifiability and no original research rules are there so that other editors can verify information more easily by simply checking a source cited. It also makes it harder for marketers and other malicious groups from simply using marketing materials or other low-quality information as sources, which is a good thing. I am greatful for what Wikipedia has to offer for me already, it’s just that sometimes things frustrate me.
]]>Kling has pointed out that passing over 90% of WPT is a major requirement imposed by Apple for allowing developers to make and use a non-Webkit browser engine on iOS.[2][1] However there are still many other restrictions Apple has placed that Ladybird is yet to overcome if they want to use their own engine on iOS.[3]
Open Web Advocacy argued earlier in July 2025 that despite the European Union mandating that Apple allow third-party browser engines on iOS, Apple’s restrictions are arguably too burdensome for even Mozilla or Google to consider porting their engines to the operating system—let alone an upcoming player like Ladybird.[4]
It’s uncertain if these restrictions will be softened by the time Ladybird begins development of its browser for mobile operating systems, which has not begun in any significant capacity during its pre-alpha stage of development.[5]
According to Ladybird’s October 2025 blog post, a large part of this achievement actually came from an update to the test suite itself, which updated Wasm core tests to Wasm 3.0.[2] That month, they passed 111,431 new subtests, compared to just 13,405 and 7,497 for the month before and after respectively.[6][7]
A user on Hacker News who claimed to be “quite heavily involved” with web-platform-tests has said that using it as a metric for progress is not recommended, as its intended more as an engineering resource rather than a user-facing metric of how good a browser is.[8]
Despite their efforts, Ladybird is still in pre-alpha, with an alpha release on Linux and MacOS planned for Summer 2026.[5] That said, it is still a major milestone passed, and despite the work ahead of them, it does represent how far Ladybird has come.
Kling, Andreas. “Ladybird has passed 90% threshold on web-platform-tests”, Twitter/X, October 5, 2025. Retrieved February 5, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎2
“Using alternative browser engines in the European Union”, Apple Developer. Retrieved February 6, 2026. ↩︎
“Apple’s Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA”, Open Web Advocacy, July 14, 2025. Retrieved February 13, 2026. ↩︎
“Ladybird”. Retrieved February 5, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎2
“Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests”, Hacker News, October 6, 2025. Retrieved February 13, 2026. ↩︎
You see, separating information like this never really felt like it could be done cleanly. Keeping a collection of information from other people tucked away into a single folder in my vault felt strange, especially as I wanted to organize resources in a similar manner as the rest of my vault.
Some of the resources I save for use in my vault includes notes/pages from other folks’ digital gardens. It did not make sense for me personally to keep them in some kind of Resources/ directory.
Beyond making more sense to me in my head, it also somewhat detaches myself from the connections I make and things I write. I don’t want to get caught up in just assuming that every insight I come across is true, and that an attack on it is an attack upon myself.
Many of my writings are inspired by works. Can I not be inspired by my own works as well?
The big drawback, of course, will be organizing it all. I’ll have to mark the content that’s written by me as, well, being written by me. Though once that’s done, I can create templates for automation.
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